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Studio User Guide
Last updated Dec 20, 2023

Chrome Extension troubleshooting

This page presents the most frequent reasons for which the UiPath Extension for Chrome might not work properly, and how to solve these issues.

Please note that browser automations with the extension for Chrome are currently possible on a single Chrome window.
Note: You need to use at least Google Chrome version 64 to perform browser automations.

Check if the Extension for Chrome is installed and enabled

  1. In Google Chrome, navigate to chrome://extensions/.
  2. Make sure the extension is installed and enabled, as explained here.
  3. If the extension was installed correctly but does not appear in Chrome, check if there are Group Policies that affect the extension, as explained here.
    docs image
    Note: Selecting the Developer mode check box at the top of the chrome://extensions/ page displays the Update button on the extension Details page.

Check If ChromeNativeMessaging.exe Is Running

The ChromeNativeMessaging.exe enables communication between the UiPath Extension for Chrome and the UiPath Studio/Robot.
  1. Open Chrome.
  2. Open Task Manager.
  3. Check if the ChromeNativeMessaging.exe process is running.


  4. If the process is not running:

    • Make sure the extension is installed. For more information on how to install it, check the docs page.
    • Check if there are Group Policies affecting ChromeNativeMessaging.exe. See the docs page for more information.
    • Check if the ComSpec environment variable is defined correctly.

If the information above did not solve your issue, you can try getting additional information by viewing traces and analyzing the errors thrown by the UiPath extension. The following are types of traces you can collect and analyze: Enabling Traces.

Enabling Traces

General Extension Traces in Google Chrome

  1. In Google Chrome, go to chrome://extensions/.
  2. Select the Developer Mode checkbox at the top of the web page.
  3. Go to the UiPath extension and click background page. The Developer Tools page is displayed.
  4. Navigate to the Console tab. All the traces generated by the extension are displayed here.
    Note: Errors are marked in red.

Traces Generated by the Web Page you Want to Automate

  1. On the webpage you want to automate, go to Side Navigation Bar > More tools > Developer tools (or press Ctrl+Shift+I). The traces generated by the UiPath extension for the current page are displayed.
    Note: Errors are marked in red.

Full traces

  1. Open the Registry Editor.
  2. Navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\UiPath key.
  3. Double-click the WebExtensionTrace DWORD value. The Edit DWORD Value window is displayed.
  4. In the Value Data field, change the value to 1, and click OK. The value is saved.
    Note: If the WebExtensionTrace DWORD value does not exist, you have to create it, by right-clicking the right panel, selecting New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, and providing the values mentioned above.

    If the extension for Chrome is still not working, remove the extension from chrome://extensions/ and reinstall it.

Check if ComSpec variable is defined correctly

If the ComSpec environment variable is missing or has an invalid value, then Google Chrome cannot launch the ChromeNativeMessaging.exe.
The solution is to manually add the correct value for the ComSpec environment variable.
This variable is set at Windows installation and should have the value %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe.


Enable access to file URLs and Incognito mode

By default, the extension is not granted access to File URLs or Incognito Mode. To enable these:

  1. In Google Chrome, navigate to chrome://extensions/. The Chrome Extensions page is displayed.
  2. Navigate to the UiPath Web Automation extension and click the Details button. The UiPath Web Automation details page is displayed.
  3. Make sure the Allow in incognito and Allow access to file URLs options are selected.


Multiple browser profiles

Multiple Chrome instances with multiple user profiles

UiPath Extension for Chrome does not support automating multiple browser instances running with multiple user profiles at the same time. As such, browser automation requires you to close all active instances of Chrome and restart the browser using a single user profile.

Stopping all Chrome instances

In some cases, Chrome background processes prevent it from closing completely, which interferes with automations even if the browser instance is not visible.

We recommend closing Chrome by right-clicking the Chrome icon in the System Tray, and selecting Exit. This ensures that no other user profiles remain in use in the background.



Known Issues Specific to MV3 Extensions

Click activity with Simulate fails on specific web page elements

The Click activity with the Simulate input method no longer works on HTML elements that have a click handler with javascript: URI.


In this case, the simulated click will not take effect and no errors will reported.

This was reported as a Chromium bug here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1299742 This issue is quite rare as very few HTML elements have click handlers in this form.

Workaround

Change the input method for the failing Click activity from Simulate to any other input method:
  • Chromium API
  • Hardware Events
  • Window Messages

The DeveloperToolsAvailability Group Policy value must be set to 1

The DeveloperToolsAvailability has the following possible values:

  • 0 = Disallow usage of the Developer Tools on extensions installed by enterprise policy, allow usage of the Developer Tools in other contexts
  • 1 = Allow usage of the Developer Tools
  • 2 = Disallow usage of the Developer Tools
If the UiPath Extension for Chrome is installed using Group Policy, then the DeveloperToolsAvailability must be set to 1 to enable the full functionality of the extension.

This value is automatically set correctly when the extension is installed but it will be overwritten if your system administrator has set another value for this policy.

The other values for DeveloperToolsAvailability cause the problems listed below.

If DeveloperToolsAvailability is set to 0 then:
  • The UiPath Extension for Chrome v22.4 will not work at all with this restriction. Please consider upgrading to the v22.10 of the extension available with UiPathStudio.msi 2022.4.4.
  • The UiPath Extension for Chrome v22.10 will be restricting to working with LTS versions of UiAutomation (19.10.x, 20.10.x, 21.10.x, 22.4.x)
  • The InjectJS Activity will not work.
If DeveloperToolsAvailability is set to 2 then:
  • All the limitations from DeveloperToolsAvailability=0 apply
  • The ChromiumAPI input method will not work.

The UiPath Web Automation browser window shows a warning

The UiPath Web Automation browser window shows the following warning if ChromeNativeMessaging.exe could not be started:

Cannot communicate with UiPath Platform The native part of the extension is not configured correctly.

Re-install the extension from UiPath Studio.

Open Browser activity has an insufficient timeout

For MV3 extensions, the browser loads the extension later, after the web pages have loaded. This means that on slower machines, the Open Browser activity from UiPath.UiAutomation.Activities version 20.10 or older can reach the internal timeout of 20 seconds before the extension has started.

Starting with v20.10.13, the internal timeout for the Open Browser activity has been increased from 20 seconds to 60 seconds.

Additionally, you can configure the timeout through the UIPATH_OPEN_BROWSER_TIMEOUT_SECONDS environment variable. For example, set UIPATH_OPEN_BROWSER_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=120 to use 120 seconds for the activity's timeout.

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